


Picking Up The Pieces

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Alcoholism, Cursed Storybrooke, F/M, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 15:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2657279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regina promised him wealth and comfort, but she did not mention happiness. In Storybrooke, Mr Gold spends his nights in the diner, grieving the death of his young wife, Belle. Until the day Lacey French walks in…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picking Up The Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Paloma Faith song of the same name – when I heard it I immediately thought of Rumpel and Lacey. This has been hanging around unfinished for ages, so I thought I’d dust it off and finish it up. Enjoy!

They meet for the first time on a Tuesday. She didn’t intend to go to Granny’s; the little diner on the main street isn’t really her style, but she’s had enough of being pawed by the guys at the Rabbit Hole and she isn’t ready to go home just yet.

The diner is quiet, just a few people eating and a couple more drinking. Lacey slides onto a barstool and looks around at the place. She rarely comes here, except sometimes for lunch to take out, and on those occasions she’s generally too preoccupied to pay her surroundings much mind.

The waitress – Ruby according to her name badge – comes over.

“What can I get you?”

“White wine. Better make it a bottle. And just the one glass.”

If Ruby is shocked by what is probably a rather unorthodox order for the conservative diner, she doesn’t show it. As the waitress moves down to the other end of the bar to the wine rack, another voice catches Lacey’s attention, and she turns to see who has spoken.

The man has his head resting on his arms on the bar and even from this distance, Lacey can tell that he’s definitely three sheets to the wind, probably more. Ruby sighs and takes the whisky tumbler from his hand.

“Mr Gold, don’t you think you’ve had enough for one night?” she asks.

The man shakes his head.

“Not enough,” he mumbles. “I’m still awake.”

“Not for long, you won’t be,” Ruby mutters. She draws a pint of water from the tap and puts it down in front of him before bringing Lacey’s wine over to her. Perhaps an entire bottle for one isn’t such an unusual order in the diner after all. Lacey pours herself a glass, continuing to watch the older man. She can’t see his face, but his hair is beginning to grey at the tips and temples and there’s a cane hooked over the bar rail beside him.

“You’re going to have a very sore head in the morning,” Ruby observes. “I’m going to start charging you extra for alka seltzer if you keep this up.”

Lacey snorts and Ruby looks at her.

“When they’re that far gone, nothing helps except a miracle,” Lacey says.

Ruby looks down at the broken man with a sigh before going to clear the tables at the back of the diner. Lacey continues to watch as Mr Gold eventually raises his head a couple of inches and takes a gulp of water. He grimaces and yells to Ruby.

“Red! There’s no whisky in this water!”

“It’s for your own good, Mr Gold,” Ruby calls back. Mr Gold gives a non-committal grunt and stares into the middle distance. Lacey continues to watch him, her own drink forgotten. He isn’t as old as she pegged him but the alcohol clearly hasn’t done him any favours. She leaves her seat and, taking her wine with her, moves to sit beside him.

He gives absolutely no indication that he even knows he has company and at length Lacey decides to start the conversation.

“I’m Lacey.”

Mr Gold turns to her, taking her in from top to toe and back again, in all her hairsprayed, sequinned and slightly worse for wear glory.

“You remind me of someone,” he slurs.

“I remind everyone of someone,” Lacey says. “Who is it this time? Daughter? Girlfriend?” She looks down at his hands and sees the band of silver wrapped round his third finger. “Wife?”

Gold snorts. “She’s dead now.”

“Who, your wife?”

He nods. “Two years today. Belle. She looked a lot like you.”

That’s the entirety of their conversation before Gold unhooks his cane from the bar rail and limps away, swaying slightly. Ruby asks him if he’s going to get home all right and he ignores her.

Lacey watches him out of the door and down the street, and she wonders.

X

She isn’t sure what keeps her coming back to the diner night after night. She tells herself it’s because the alcohol’s cheaper there, even if the atmosphere is stale and dead as opposed to the vibrancy she’s always known at the Rabbit Hole. She knows that really, it’s because of Mr Gold, always there in his spot at the end of the bar, always drowning in whisky. Lacey’s not really sure why she’s so drawn to him, or why she keeps engaging him in conversation. (They’ve managed more than a few lines strung together now and can actually hold a vaguely sensible discussion, considering that Gold’s generally always plastered before they start and Lacey joins him in inebriation soon after). Ruby just watches over them from behind the bar, disapproving and despairing in between her arguments with her grandmother.

“He’s not a nice man, Lacey,” the waitress warns her. Ruby tells her that Belle, the mysterious other woman always in the background, committed suicide, jumped off the clocktower in the middle of the night. No-one knows why she did it. Many think Gold was cruel to her and she couldn’t take it anymore. Lacey’s not sure she subscribes to that theory. Surely he wouldn’t be so lost without her if he had driven her to do what she did. But then again, maybe he’s trying to drink away his guilt.

In the end Lacey decides she doesn’t care. She’s recognised him as a fellow lost soul and she’ll keep him company for as long as he’ll buy her wine. She’s not surprised when they end up in bed together in the monstrosity of a pink behemoth he calls home. She told Ruby she’d see him home after one whisky too many, and somehow they end up kissing on his doorstep and somehow they end up going inside and somehow they end up sprawled on his bed half-naked. There’s a certain awkwardness next morning as neither of them are at their best when hungover, but as soon as Gold’s got the first drink of the day into his system and Lacey’s brushed her teeth, there’s a sort of an understanding between them. They’re not in love, not really. They’re just two people in a similar situation, looking out for each other because there is no-one else to, and if that involves sex as well, then so be it.

X

Lacey knows it’s inevitable, that the day would come when he’d call her Belle in the heat of the moment. She’s not surprised when it happens but she’s surprised that it makes her feel so hurt and betrayed. He’s drunk, he misses his wife and from what he’s said, Lacey looks just like her, but there are no photos in the house to corroborate. (It’s such an odd house, nothing seems to fit right, like there’s too much stuff in a space too small for it, and none of it looks like it belongs in a house anyway, more a castle or a museum.)

But it twists her gut when he calls her Belle and it sends her out of bed and out of the house, back towards the diner, wondering why she’s crying.

“I’m not her!” she yells before she leaves. “I’m not Belle! I don’t know who she was but she’s not me!”

She avoids the diner for the next few nights and returns to the Rabbit Hole, hooks up with a string of guys whose names she forgets next day, but none of them really help to take her mind off Gold and eventually she returns to the diner to find him.

He says he’s sorry, but he’s drunk so much she’s got no idea if he means it. She thinks he does, he’s an honest drunk, like she is. Alcohol loosens his tongue and pulls down the mental walls, letting everything out into the raw open.

So they make up, sort of, and they return to the status quo. She hears him mutter the name in his sleep sometimes and it still hurts. Lacey doesn’t know why she feels so jealous of a dead woman, but in those moments, Belle does not seem very dead. She seems very much alive, a spectre in the room with them, hanging there like an oppressive shadow, watching and waiting.

It’s not the last time he calls her Belle, it’s not the last time she walks out, and it’s not the last time she comes back.

X

When they first met, Lacey said that nothing would help Gold except a miracle.

Emma Swan is that miracle.

From the moment she arrived in town, Gold has been different. He’s no longer at the diner every night, indeed, he can’t be found in any drinking establishment. Lacey wonders if he’s just raided the off license and is holed up in his pink house, wallowing away his sorrows in private, but she doesn’t think so, for when she sees him round the town during the day, he seems alert, sharper, colder. Something’s changed, with Emma Swan’s arrival, and Lacey is not sure she likes it.

He’s actively avoiding her, and when they do meet and interaction is unavoidable, he keeps calling her Belle by accident. At least, she thinks it’s by accident, because he’s generally sober now and he only ever used to get her name wrong when he was drunk.

She wants to go and ask him what the hell his problem is, but something stops her. She never went to his house to see him before. She’s been to his house often, but they always went there by mutual consent, together. She’s never gone to talk to him before. There’s a sort of unspoken taboo in place, so Lacey stays away, and wonders what has changed, what kind of magic spell Emma Swan put on him to turn him so upside down.

X

She breaks on Valentine’s Day and goes to his door – having had not a little Dutch courage beforehand. She spends a good ten minutes ranting to him on his doorstep before thinking ‘oh what the hell’ and going in for a kiss because damn it, she’s missed him and she wants him to see what he’s been missing too.

He pushes her away, hands firm on her shoulders.

“Be-Lacey, you don’t know what you want,” he says. “You’re drunk. I won’t take advantage of that.”

“Never stopped you before,” Lacey says.

Gold sighs and looks away, and Lacey can see shame and self-loathing etched into his face even through the haze of wine that clouds her judgment and common sense.

“I know it didn’t,” he says sadly. “I’m so sorry, Belle.”

The red mist of anger swirls up inside her again and Lacey screams.

“ _I am not her!”_

Gold looks so old and tired and sad as he replies.

“No. You’re not.”

X

When the curse breaks, she’s in Granny’s, and she can’t get her head around it.

There never was a Belle.

Or rather, there was a Belle. She was Belle. She’s Belle and she’s Lacey. The woman she felt so jealous of… is her. She was Belle. She _is_ Belle. All those times she yelled that she wasn’t Belle, and yet, she is.

It’s too much for her to try and take in.

She wonders how long Rumpel has known. She suspects ever since Emma came to town. That was when he started avoiding her. That was when he started calling her Belle all the time. He remembered her real identity.

Belle pushes all the confusing thoughts about the past twenty-eight years aside. (Has it really been twenty-eight years? Twenty-eight years of drinking and fucking and breaking up and making up in a constant, monotonous cycle?) She focuses on the immediate present. She has to find Rumpel.

As it turns out, he finds her; they bump into each other just outside the entrance to the diner.

“Belle…” he breathes, and for once she doesn’t correct him, doesn’t yell or scream. She just nods.

“That’s me,” she says eventually.

“Belle, I’m so sorry.”

Belle knows what he’s sorry for. For creating the curse that brought them to this land, for throwing her out of the castle,  for everything that happened to her after she left him, for everything that happened after they arrived in Storybrooke, for all the times they had sex whilst she wasn’t completely sober.

But in the end it doesn’t matter. Belle throws her arms around him and buries her face in his neck, and she realises that for all the time they spent in the same bed, they never really embraced like this, they were never really intimate.

Belle doesn’t care. What’s past is past and it makes her head hurt to try and think about it. He’s Rumpel, she’s Belle, they’re here and they’re together, and they can start to pick up the pieces.


End file.
